Home Schooling

From the Civil War to battles against desegregation, the South has held to a fierce independence regarding government institutions. The growing movement to take students out of schools and imprint them with family values and learning priorities attracts both the left and the right side of the pedagogical spectrum.

“We wanted to teach our children moral values along with everything else,” says Susan Van Dyke of North Carolinians for Home Education in Raleigh. “We wanted a Christian influence and more control over our family life,” she says. Religion is an important reason many Southern parents home school their children. Polls show that the majority of families who home school come from fundamentalist or evangelical religious backgrounds. Even the names of the state associations for home schoolers show a religious purpose. Among them are the Christian Home Education Fellowship of Alabama, Arkansas Christian Home Education Association, and Christian Home Educators Fellowship in Louisiana.

“More people probably do it for religious reasons; they want their children to be just like them,” says Lucinda Flodin, a Tennessee mother who was not welcome in a local home schooling group because she didn’t share the members’ religious views. “We believe in religious freedom and want our kids to know a diverse group of people, so we formed our own group.”

Flodin and 25 other families meet to do geography projects, international feasts, sports, and more. She says she tailors material to fit her two teenaged sons’ individual learning styles and to make sure the boys learn about issues of race and class. “We teach them that as white males they are privileged,” she says.

With about a million home schoolers spread across the country, home schooling is by no means just a Southern trend, but home educators like Van Dyke and Flodin are growing in numbers across the South. Texas ranks highest in the nation among home schooling states — over 90,000 or 11.3 percent home-educated students live in the Lone Star state. Florida and Georgia also rank among the top ten, with 4.4 and 4.3 percent of all home schoolers, respectively.

In all 50 states home schooling is legal, but there’s much debate over the costs and benefits. Critics say home-schooled children aren’t socialized well enough, their parents aren’t adequately trained, and some children end up being ignored or abused. Child welfare advocates in Louisiana found that some children were left unattended by adults in home schooling situations or exposed to cult-like situations.

Proponents say those are rare and extreme cases, however. “Home schoolers go out of their way to provide their children with social experiences,” says Christena Hansen, spokeswoman for the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) in Virginia. “They also avoid drugs and violence in the schools, get one-on-one attention, and don’t waste time — they do very well on standardized tests.”

These positives are pushing home schooling up 15-25 percent per year, according to the HSLDA. Through its persistent support for home schoolers facing legal battles, the HSLDA has helped relax home school laws. In Tennessee, where Flodin lives, the group helped ease rules so that a college degree is no longer necessary for parents to qualify to teach home schooling; a high school diploma will do. While most states require standardized testing or evaluations of home school students, several, including Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Texas do not, according to the HSLDA.

A lot of the success of home schooling depends on the parents. Flodin says she learns as much as her sons from the home school experience. “It’s worth the time and energy,” she says. “They help keep our minds alive; we try to see the educational value in everything we do.”